Envying the dead

Someone I care about is in the hospital right now, hanging on to her last breaths of life. Just before Christmas she was diagnosed with acute leukemia, and so far two rounds of chemotherapy have done nothing but make her weaker. She was hospitalized upon diagnosis and has not left the hospital since. As a result, death has been on my mind more than usual for the past couple of months. I say “more than usual” because I do, as a rule, think about death a lot, having suffered from severe depression for some 20 odd years.

And I realize that I still envy the dead.

For clarification, I do not envy the suffering that cancer brings–the weakness, the shortness of breath, the nausea, the tremors, the gradual loss of autonomy. Seeing my friend this way is a helpless and oppressive feeling. What I envy is that she is close to being released from the limitations of the physical body. As I slowly become more sensitized to the presence of energies and incorporeal entities, I long to be one with them, to be able to travel from one place to another at the speed of thought. I want to be with Puck again.

I know I have the tendency to live in the past and in the future. Yoda might have been speaking to me when he said, “Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph.” So I will continue my efforts to stop obsessing and live more in the moment. I’m under no illusions about the briefness and fragility of life.